If the story of my early years with Russ sound like they were years of battle, then the sound is correct. - C. West Churchman

O.R.'s initial development began in the United Kingdom during World War II and was quickly taken up in the United States. This start took place in a military context. After the war O.R. moved into business, industry and civil government. This movement was slower in the United States than in the United Kingdom but in 1951 industrial O.R. took hold in this country and has since developed very rapidly.

To conceive of knowledge as a collection of information seems to rob the concept of all of its life. Knowledge resides in the user and not in the collection. It is how the user reacts to a collection of information that matters.

The theory of the nature of mathematics is extremely reactionary. We do not subscribe to the fairly recent notion that mathematics is an abstract language based, say, on set theory. In many ways, it is unfortunate that philosophers and mathematicians like Russell and Hilbert were able to tell such a convincing story about the meaning-free formalism of mathematics. In Greek, mathematics simply meant learning, and we have adapted this... to define the term as "learing to decide." Mathematics is a way of preparing for decisions through thinking. Sets and classes provide one way to subdivide a problem for decision preparation; a set derives its meaning from decision making, and not vice versa.